Methods for de novo chemical synthesis of nucleic acids based on solid-phase phosphoramidite chemistry have been largely used and refined over the past 40 years. The technique consists of a four-step chain elongation cycle that adds one base per cycle onto a growing oligonucleotide chain attached to a solid support matrix. Although it has been the method of choice to synthesize nucleic acids during the past decades, this technology has some notable limitations: It requires the use of multiple solvents and reagents, and due to limitations in chemical reaction efficiency, the length of synthetic oligonucleotides typically do not exceed 150-200 bases. Moreover, these short fragments need to be further assembled to provide the desired DNA sequence.
One alternative to chemical synthesis consists in using template independent DNA polymerases that will add reversible terminator modified nucleotides to a growing single stranded chain of nucleic acids. This allows the addition of one type of nucleotide per cycle in a controlled fashion.
Some native enzymes are able to act on natural nucleotides in the absence of template and so can catalyze the synthesis of nucleic acids in an uncontrolled fashion. However, they are particularly inefficient to incorporate modified nucleotides and more particularly reversible terminator modified nucleotides. Efforts have been made to develop new DNA polymerases able to act on modified nucleotides but the resulting enzymes are not fully satisfactory in terms of performances for the synthesis of any type of nucleic acids.
So far, only few DNA polymerases that can act efficiently on single strand DNA (without the use of template) have been identified. The most characterized polymerase having such template-independent activity is the Terminal deoxynucleotidyl Transferase (TdT). TdT enzymes have been extensively used to modify single stranded DNA for various types of applications including biotechnology, biomedical research and synthetic biology. However, native TdT is poorly able to use modified nucleotides.
Several attempts to develop modified TdT with acceptable performance for the incorporation of modified nucleotides have been carried over. However, the performances of the incorporation of such modified nucleotides is still a limiting factor. Incorporation efficiency is the key parameter driving the overall purity and yield of synthesis. These two characteristics of the synthesis process have a significant impact of quality, turnaround time and cost of nucleic acid products.
There is therefore a need to develop improved TdT capable to use modified nucleotides in the absence of template, for developing efficient and cost-effective methods for the nucleic acid synthesis.